What's New in the Adobe CC 2015 Update?

The 2015 release of Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform is here, and with it comes a bundle of new features for some of your favorite apps, from Photoshop to InDesign to Premiere Pro.

Here, our experts highlight some of the new features you can look forward to in the Adobe CC 2015 update:

Design

Illustrator CC 2015

The 2015 release of Illustrator has some great new features and some subtle tweaks to existing features that will make your life a whole lot easier. First up are the auto-save and Safe Mode features—both long-awaited by the Illustrator user community.

Auto save
The auto-save feature is turned on by default, but you’ll want to go in and tweak your settings to your liking. You can do that by going to Preferences>File Handling & Clipboard and then looking for the Data Recovery section at the top. Once you’ve got it set, Illustrator will save copies of your work at the specified time interval making it easier for you to get the files back if a crash were to happen.

Safe Mode
The crash recovery feature is also nice because it will allow you to boot Illustrator into a new Safe Mode. Let’s face it, crashes happen, and they can happen for any number of reasons. Safe Mode allows you to start Illustrator even if there’s a fatal-crash-inducing event. You can even diagnose the problem and hopefully correct it before you restart the program again.
This is a great feature that I hope I never have to use, but I’ll be glad it’s there when I do.

Performance enhancements
Adobe has finally brought GPU acceleration to both Mac and PC platforms. This means that assuming you have a compatible GPU, you’ll now be able to pan, zoom, and scroll a lot faster in Illustrator; they’ve also increased the zoom percentage to 64,000% over the previous 6,400%.

Shape Builder enhancements
If you’ve watched any of my Illustrator courses here at lynda.com, you know that I’m a big fan of the Shape Builder tool. Well, now that tool is even better because you’re no longer limited by its linear functionality. Adobe has added the ability to free-form draw with the Shape Builder, making it easier than ever to merge or subtract your vector objects.

CC Charts (Preview)
The final marquee feature of the 2015 release of Illustrator is the new CC Charts integration. This feature completely rethinks the idea of charts in Illustrator, and it provides you with some really interesting ways of creating graphical representations of your data.
However, you should know that this is simply a preview feature for now, and so it’s not quite feature-complete. My guess is that we’ll see quite a bit more from CC Charts in the future, but this is certainly a nice start.

There are several new features in InDesign CC 2015, but the one I want to focus on is the inclusion of Creative Cloud Libraries. This was one of my favorite things Adobe released last year, but I was sad to see that InDesign wasn’t on the list of apps to get this amazing feature. After all, it seems like InDesign would be the logical choice for a feature like this, given its role as the page layout titan of the Creative Cloud.

Well, we asked for it, and Adobe finally delivered.

The CC Libraries panel works much the same in InDesign as it does in Photoshop or Illustrator, but with a few minor adjustments. For starters, you can now add InDesign character and paragraph styles to your CC Libraries, which should make typophiles like me extremely happy!

Also of note is the ability to add color themes directly to your libraries using the Color Themes tool in InDesign. Now anytime you create a color theme using this tool, there is a new icon that allows you to instantly add it to the current library you have selected.

In addition to these great features, there’s also a subtle, yet fantastic change to the behavior of libraries seen across the entire suite of Creative Cloud apps. With the 2015 release, it’s now possible to create linked assets within your libraries. That means that you can have an asset stored in the library and dynamically update it via the Creative Cloud and have it then update across the board to all the apps that make use of the libraries feature.
This is a huge improvement over the previous generation of the libraries feature, and one that I’ll be using a lot!

The latest update to Muse may seem small on the surface, but I assure you it’s not. There are two major features that make this a great release: the addition of TypeKit web fonts and the new Muse starter templates.

TypeKit integration
Adobe purchased TypeKit a few years ago, and since then they’ve been hard at work integrating it into just about every application but Muse. Well, now the wait is over because Muse finally has TypeKit web fonts.
What this means is that designers can now truly break free from the shackles of boring typography and unleash their creativity onto the web just as they do in print. The best part is that Muse takes care of all the coding stuff in the background. All you have to do is pick a font, use it, and hit the publish button. What could be better than that?

Starter files
Many people email me after watching my Muse Essential Training course and say that they need inspiration for their project, or they just don’t know where to start when designing a new site. Well, with this update to Muse, Adobe is trying to fix those problems by adding in five new starter files. The files follow several distinct themes including personal websites, photography portfolios, restaurant landing pages, conferences and event websites, and business-centric sites as well.
All of these templates are available from the welcome screen in Muse and they should give you a solid foundation on which to build your projects.

Photography

Photoshop and Lightroom

Despite having “photo” in its name, Photoshop is hugely popular among designers and application developers. And it’s these audiences that Adobe focused on in the 2015 release, with features like the Illustrator CC-like “artboards” and the new app design space.

But photography also got some attention in the new release. Most notably, the Blur Gallery filter, which enables you to simulate shallow depth of field, now lets you restore some of the digital noise to areas that you’ve blurred, thus enhancing the realism of the blur effect.

Other enhancements include the ability to transform a selection after using the Content Aware Move tool, and the ability to apply adjustment layers to smart objects.

Adobe Camera Raw also gains new features in the 2015 release. You can now create panoramas and high-dynamic range (HDR) images directly within Camera Raw—just as you can in Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6, both of which shipped in April.

The new Camera Raw 9.1 also adds a haze-reduction feature that’s useful in landscape and aerial photography. Adobe has also added this feature to Lightroom CC, though not to Lightroom 6.

Video

After Effects

On the compositing and animation side, After Effects got a big boost for character animation with the introduction of the Adobe Character Animator. This new tool brings a new character rigging system and the ability to animate 2D characters using a web cam.
Uninterrupted previewing allows an artist to continue working while a preview is currently playing back without stopping the preview. And the Face Tracker adds the ability to track human faces in a video as they move over time. This can greatly aid in the application of effects and masking.

Premiere Pro CC 2015 offers up a new simplified color correction workflow that’s based on the new Lumetri Color panel with powerful color correction using intuitive sliders and simple controls.
The Morph Cut transition effect smoothly transitions between jump cuts on single talking head footage making it easier than ever to hide edits in an interview.

Both Premiere and AFter Effects now offer Creative Cloud libraries integration, giving you in-app access to all of your online assets.